Summer 2023

The American Scholar

Venerable but Lively.

The American Scholar1 min read
The American Scholar
SUDIP BOSE Editor BRUCE FALCONER Executive Editor STEPHANIE BASTEK Senior Editor JAYNE ROSS Associate Editor DAVID HERBICK Design Director SANDRA COSTICH Editor-at-Large LANGDON HAMMER Poetry Editor SALLY ATWATER Copy Editor PETER OUIMBY Consulting E
The American Scholar2 min read
Editing Ted
We recently learned that Edward Hoagland's “On Aging” (Spring 2022) will be included in this year's Best American Essays anthology, edited by Vivian Gornick. It's a lovely honor for Hoagland, a Scholar contributing editor whose career has spanned nea
The American Scholar6 min read
False Prophets
The way my mother told the story, my birth was a miracle. Diagnosed with terminal cancer six months into the pregnancy, she was not expected to live to the end of the nine-month term. Doctors told her that if she were to have an abortion, she might l
The American Scholar5 min read
Putting the Story Back in History
One afternoon 40 years ago, soon after beginning graduate work in history at the University of Virginia, I was sitting at a study carrel with a pile of books and a stack of index cards. The latter, I had learned, was one of the historian's most impor
The American Scholar3 min read
Freud Airlines
Welcome to Freud Airlines. Your psyche is our highest priority. Do not accept any personal baggage from someone you don't know. If anyone tries to give you an unsolicited diagnosis, please alert the gate attendant. Be advised that frequent-flyer mile
The American Scholar7 min read
Dancing With Deneuve
In 1969, I was living in London, paying $40 a month for a flat near Notting Hill Gate, wearing a secondhand pea coat against the damp, and trying to write my first novel. To earn some money, I was dashing off profiles of aging movie stars for United
The American Scholar6 min read
A Room For The Ages
On an early spring day in March, I drove 800 miles, from Brooklyn to Atlanta, to see a room I knew I could never enter. In the basement of Oglethorpe University's Phoebe Hearst Hall lies a locked room—20 feet long, 10 feet wide and 10 feet high—that'
The American Scholar6 min read
Get Me Rewrite!
Even after all these years, I am still amazed at the seemingly magical process by which a skilled editor can transform a manuscript— how, after a draft or two (or sometimes more), your prose somehow becomes seamless and your narrative propulsive, the
The American Scholar22 min read
A Kingdom of Little Animals
One night in 1677, a grizzled man in a wrinkled linen nightshirt rushed from his bemused wife's bed with a candle in hand to examine the “remains of conjugal coitus, immediately after ejaculation before six beats of the pulse.” Using the candle to ca
The American Scholar16 min read
The Whole World in His Hands
David Stromberg is the editor of In the Land of Happy Tears: Yiddish Tales for Modern Times as well as two volumes of Isaac Bashevis Singer's work. His recent writing includes “A Short Inquiry into the End of the World,” the first in his “Mister Inve
The American Scholar13 min read
Night Vision
Tamara Dean has written for The Guardian, Orion, and The Southern Review, among other publications. The author of the book The Human Powered Home, she recently moved to Madison, Wisconsin. Her essay “Slow Blues,” published in the Autumn 2020 issue of
The American Scholar4 min read
In the Aftermath of Civil War
The palmyra palm is revered by the Tamil people of Sri Lanka, where it is known as a celestial tree, a symbol of fertility, every part of which can be used. In Vidyan Ravinthiran's “The Burnt Palmyra,” one of these trees speaks. Although it has been
The American Scholar19 min read
The Lives of Bryan
Jennifer Sinor is an essayist and a professor of English at Utah State University. “We lost Bryan,” my father says into the phone, his voice breaking in the cavernous space between each word. He is talking to an old friend of his, someone I knew as a
The American Scholar13 min read
Last Dance
In 2012,1 decided to retire from touring as an indie rock musician and enter a gaduate program in American Studies at the University of Wyoming, I'd been living in my hometown of Nashville and, having been to Wyoming only once—on a day trip to Yellow
The American Scholar16 min read
The Color of Dust
PATRICK TRIPP is a physician and an associate professor of radiation oncology at the University of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia VA Medical Center. In 1967 and ‘68, in the hills and valleys of Quang Tri Province, U.S. Marines established position
The American Scholar14 min read
Projections of Life
David Owen is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a contributing editor of Golf Digest and Popular Mechanics. His most recent book is Volume Control: Hearing in a Deafening World. Thirty-five years ago, my father gave me a box that had sat in his at
The American Scholar20 min read
One Look Back
Ann Beattie, a contributing editor of the Scholar, has published 20 novels and short story collections. She is the recipient of the PEN/ Malamud Award and the Rea Award for the Short Story. Her work appears in five O. Henry Prize Stories anthologies
The American Scholar16 min read
Epithalamium
BILL ROORBACH is the author of 10 books, including the memoir Summers with Juliet, the novels Lucky Turtle and Life Among Giants, and the Flannery O'Connor Award-winning collection Big Bend. His work has appeared in Harper's, The New York Times Magaz
The American Scholar7 min read
Will The Real Vergil Please Stand Up?
Great works of literature are sly and powerful beasts that pounce on their readers, grabbing them by the neck and shaking them back and forth. The young Augustine looks like a typical victim of Vergil's Aeneid. The schoolboy being brought up as a Chr
The American Scholar4 min read
Frontline Oracle
David Chrisinger's The Soldier's Truth is a road book suffused with a spirit of discovery and adventure. Perhaps no genre is better suited to its subject, the World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle, who could not stay home. Chrisinger asked himself wh
The American Scholar4 min read
We Ain't Seen Nothin’ Yet
Consider fungi. They are their own kingdom, more closely related to animal than to plant. They grow and search for food with threadlike hyphae. They feed by excreting digestive juices onto their dinner, living or dead, to help break down nutrients be
The American Scholar4 min read
Family Tatters
It's almost amazing that not once in his intensely readable new book does Alexander Stille quote Philip Larkin's most (in)famous line of poetry: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” That sentiment was, essentially, the motivating principle of the co
The American Scholar4 min readMathematics
Don't Forget Intuition
As unlikely as it sounds, we've entered the age of the physics beach read—a breezy stroll through some branch of the science, with alternating touches of profundity and whimsy. Recent exemplars include Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli
The American Scholar3 min read
Shell Shock And Awe
Always, in wars, there are the things we don't see coming. World War I had a lot of them: airplanes, machine guns, barbed wire, tanks, flamethrowers, and super-high-explosive artillery shells— the blooming, booming fruit of 19th-century scientific pr
The American Scholar4 min read
Notes And Outtakes
At the age of 92, John McPhee would seem to have earned a rest. The author of more than 30 books, he has been writing for six decades for The New Yorker, where the reporting in many of those volumes first appeared. The John McPhee Reader has been a s
The American Scholar4 min read
Someone's Gotta Do It
In their new book, Henry at Work, John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle offer a surprising source of wisdom for the working world: Henry David Thoreau, infamous for shirking work by beating a retreat to the woods. Kaag and van Belle correct this cliché by
The American Scholar4 min read
Commonplace Book
Soft, to your places, animals, Your legendary duty calls. —Thomas Kinsella, Another September, 1958 —Go—says he, one day at dinner, to an overgrown [fly] which had buzz'd about his nose, and tormented him cruelly all dinner-time,— and which, after in
The American Scholar1 min read
Anniversaries
Director Toshiya Fujita's 1973 revenge thriller, Lady Snowblood, which turns 50 this year, has the distinction of being one of the few Japanese exploitation movies archived in the Criterion Collection. Set at the start of the Meiji era, when Japan fi

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